


The Wound and the Stone Become Lovers

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aliens Made Them Do It, Blood, Broken Bones, Caves, Choking, Crimes to Geology, Dubious Consent, Evil Twelve, Exhibitionism, F/M, Gloves, Mind Control, Other, Psychic vampire, Restraints, Ritual Sacrifice, Slapping, Stabbing, Stone Knives, Stone Vampire, Taunting, Telepathy, The Feast of the Stone, Threats, Touch, Various Forms of Penetration, injuries, mortal peril, mouths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-25 04:02:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20717768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: When the TARDIS lands in an ancient stone chamber, a creature formed of fear and cruelty seizes the Doctor's mind in a psychic trap. It's up to Missy to confront this monster and rescue the Doctor—at great risk to herself.





	The Wound and the Stone Become Lovers

Adam ate the apple.  
Eve ate Adam.  
The serpent ate Eve.  
This is the dark intestine.

\--Ted Hughes, "Theology"

“Look! I’m you!” The Doctor waggles his fingers, white and slender in a pair of dancing gloves. Missy, up to her elbows in a tangle of fiber and circuitry, extricates herself from the hole in the deck plating, the better to appreciate his gangly hands and cheesy smile. He’s found a top hat, too, perched at a cant with tufts of hair poking out between its brim and his ears. 

Missy tilts her head and shakes it. “No...not even close. But if the glove fits…”

His face falls. He removes the hat, spinning it as he puts it on the console. “How are the repairs going?”

Missy braces the heels of her hands on the floor and arches her back in a luxurious stretch before bothering to answer him. “It’s a bit difficult to find the thing that needs repairing when you’ve made such a mess of the things around it.” The floor hums, warm, as though in agreement. 

“Maybe it’s time for a break. Nardole’s made tea.”

“Oh, I suppose I wouldn't mind.” She sits up to roll her sleeves down. 

“You’ve got a smudge—” the Doctor leans in and rubs his thumb against her cheek. His glove comes away with TARDIS residue on it. He turns his hand over to inspect it, the fabric stretching over his knuckles. 

So that’s what this is about. The safety of putting a barrier between them, like the safety of a forcefield or of the distance of a magazine cover and a table with a thermos on it, which allows them to be close. His wrist shows under the glove and his sleeve, the only chink in this armour. 

“I’m coming up the stairs, and I had better not see anything I shouldn’t see when I get to the top!” Nardole is conspicuous about clattering the tea tray, but he needn’t be. Already, the Doctor is moving away, one hand in his pocket, the other taking a cup. 

“What’s the sticky bun situation?” he asks, putting his cup down and dropping sugar cubes into it. 

“Bill’s coming with them. There’s sticky buns with jam, sticky buns with cream...”

A block of sugar strikes an off note against the pile building in the bowl of the teacup, tink-tinkling when it should be thunking. There’s sudden silence in the capsule, a full stop. Nardole is still listing buns, oblivious, but the silence swallows his words. Missy’s already on her feet. The Doctor stares up at the rotor. 

“...typical. They’re not listening to me. Why ask? More importantly, why bother to answer?”

“Shush!”

The TARDIS hasn’t materialised, but neither is the TARDIS still in motion; they were in the vortex, now they’re not. All the mechanisms and machinery of movement--stopped. Something has pulled them out of their trajectory as though plucking a bird out of the air. Futile flutter. The Doctor flips switches and depresses keys. He turns knobs. Nothing happens. He shoots a look at Missy, all hawk and owl. 

“I didn’t do this,” she says, serious. 

He tugs the viewscreen around to him. The cameras work, at least. They see a long stone room, bowed edges barely discernible in the dark. A natural cave? Or was it chiseled out by hand?

The Doctor turns his head to the door. 

Bill, showing up belatedly with the sticky buns, comes around to peer at the image. “What’s going on? Something felt really weird and...not-normal?”

“I don’t know.” Then, the Doctor grins, happy. “Want to find out?”

It’s his favourite pastime: a mystery, a place gone wrong, the opportunity to fix it. He never takes precautions and he doesn’t bother to pause, and maybe it’s something he’s good at, or maybe he’s just lucky. Always lucky. Missy’s hesitant about this one, but if she’s coming along, he’s going to keep her by his side, he says, and so she is second out the door, no time to retrieve her jacket from the railing, much less her umbrella from its hook. 

Lucky—or foolish, and too practiced at paving over the costs, at pouring fresh material over the damage. 

The stone chamber is subterranean, lightless but for the light they’ve brought with them. It smells of the stillness of deep rock, mineralised and inorganic, isolated long ago from the emissions of any star. In its centre, it’s worn as though someone once walked here and, around those paths, squared off with the precise approximation of primitive architecture—Missy is reminded at once of ancient ceremonies, of embroidered robes and decorated implements and measured footsteps heavy with import. Along its edges, the tool-touched walls turn wild again, winding into ropey, undulating surfaces, where burnish becomes gloss or sheen, and the carved space becomes raw tunnel, a great throat, an esophagus, an intestine of rock and weight. 

She sees him for a second, stock-still and stiff with pain, and has time to think how familiar a sight it is, the Doctor with his back like a mast straining under rigging taut with sail, before it has her too. It wants—it’s known them before, and it has riffled, heedless of reality, patiently and comprehensively through all the sheaths of all the universes to find them.

They’ve changed so much. It tastes her and discards her. Wraps a line of silk around her and saves her for later. 

_Him_, though...

All that glowering attention, all the knives, like stone and bronze and iron teeth, and he is the lodestone. He has become magma. He has cooled himself, slowly, slowly, and crystallised fine and opaque and brittle, and he has opened himself to lightning and written his history in that thing below bone, beneath marrow, and beyond chromosome that makes a Time Lord constant under the skin. The stone, magnetised into record in the same way by its past of enormous heat and pressure, recognises him now and draws in, enthralled and hungry. 

Such violence. Such need. Such self-destruction. The trough can run again. The runnels can fill forever. 

Missy spins around and steps right back into the TARDIS and shuts the door behind her. The silken line dissolves, clearing the cloying cloud from her mind, the veiled, heady edges from her vision.

_Shields_, she thinks. _The TARDIS is shielding me. She, at least, knows this creature, and how to defend against it. I’m safe in here. I’m safe._

She’s breathing very quickly. 

“What are you doing?” Nardole exclaims. “The Doctor’s out there!”

Fueled though she is by adrenaline, Missy has little chance of budging the stubborn machine man, so she seizes Bill by the arm and pulls her over to the console. She aims her at the viewscreen. If anything, the cave has gone dimmer with insinuated shadow, massed and teeming, and the Doctor might be a statue or a lightning rod in the nucleus of it. 

“That is a psychic vampire mouthing the Doctor like a pheasant in its jaws, and the Doctor is much, much stronger than you are, either of you. Stay here, and don’t go out there, no matter what. It will eat you, and I will be very disappointed, because I was hoping to have you for elevensies.”

Bill stares at the image. “But we can’t just leave him!”

Missy seeks Nardole out over Bill’s shoulder and stares him down. She needs to know he’s listening. She needs to know he’ll obey. But in case he doesn’t—and why should he?—she's inputting commands at speed, commands they won’t know how to override. “You cannot help. There’s no safety for you outside the protection of the shields. However...I do think it’ll let the TARDIS go, once it—once it has what it wants. You’ll have to figure it out with your wizard computer skills.”

Nardole starts to speak, but Missy’s already out the door. It swings to, clicks shut, and locks them in with all the firmness of a strongroom door.

In the cave, the Doctor begins to smile. It’s not a good smile. It twists inside her, suspended with the thing that's interested in her own vast corruptions. 

Missy circles warily, unwilling to get too close, watching him, focussing on him. He pivots, following the arc she's tracing from the TARDIS, feigning to move away from it while getting no nearer the centrepiece of the cave at all. He’s looking at her, but he doesn't seem to see her. He’s smiling to himself, or at himself; it’s a smile like a weapon, an instrument he’s interposing into his core, arched and keen.

She halts. He does, too, and waits. 

She tries offering her hand. “Come with me, Doctor. It's time for tea. I've found a very, very sticky bun with cream _and_ jam inside… Come with me.”

He gazes at her outstretched hand, and still he doesn't seem to see. 

“Take my hand,” she says. 

The Doctor looks at his own hands, white figures, still encased in fabric. He looks at his palms, fingers half curled over them, twists them over, looks at the lines of the bones. In this gloom, they are the brightest things, bouncing back small specks of light so that they seem almost to glow. 

He puts his hands down, and at last blinks slowly at her with eyes that see her as more than just a movement to be tracked, eyes that are the Doctor’s. But the expression in them freezes her, a pointed pin through her solar plexus. 

“Missy,” he says, as though naming her, owning her, still very far away. But then recognition turns to realisation, and his voice fills with despair. “Oh, no, no. Why did you come back? Not you; no not you!” 

Well, thank you very much, my dear.

He isn’t going to take her hand. She’s going to have to take his. “Doctor,” she says, calling to him in the dark.

His hand in the air is a dove, a swallow, a tern, tender and hollow-boned. Outstretched, it could be an invitation, a threat, or a plea. She steps out of the circle of the TARDIS’ protection to receive it, her own hands bare to the closing talons.

His gloves are silky, his hand not quite his hand in the close-fit wrapping. She feels his fingers at a padded remove, more aware of their shape and pressure than she would be if she’d been touching him skin to skin. 

The moment she’s completely exposed, he knows it. His smile turns sly. 

“You weren’t going to rescue him,” he says. “You didn’t think you really could, did you? Sit with me, let me make you comfortable.”

Carved into the stone are a set of stairs, five steps up to a shadowed dais. Missy approaches warily but arranges herself on the top of them. The form of the cave presses down on her. The strata overhead close in, rapt. A brutal geological event created this place, but people, sentient beings came along after with their hands and their tools and their meanings, smoothing menace into its walls, shaping terrible purpose in the form of these steps, this platform, and the infrastructure of slaughter atop it. The Doctor moves above her, leaning against the plinth as casually as if it were a banister. 

“So,” he says after a ripe and contemplative pause, the hairs all but lifting on the back of her neck, “you begged him to teach you goodness, why?”

Missy shrugs. She keeps her voice light. “He was going to execute me.”

“No. I know that fear. I invented that fear. Try again.”

Missy stares across the gallery of the cave to the TARDIS on the other end, the light glowing through the windows and on the peak of the roof. Her nonchalance slipping. 

“What hold can he have over you?” he prompts when she doesn’t answer.

She’s bemused to be asked such a question by an entity that even now is rooting around inside her head. 

“What hold does anyone have on anyone?” she asks, craning up to look at him through big eyes, as though body language could sway something that only borrows bodies. (But the borrowed body knows her, responds to her...doesn’t it?) “Why d’you want to know? What do you care?”

A slow, pleased smile. “You would say, ‘Because it’s fun. Because it’s pretty.’”

She would, he knows. The thing speaking to her with the Doctor’s voice and leering at her with the Doctor’s teeth is not only a ventriloquist; it’s made up of the Doctor’s ideas, his but also hers and the thoughts of all those countless others: the hiereus and the acolyte, the victims and the ones who brought them there, when the stars were some arbitrary arrangement in the sky, to look forever into infinity. 

“Oh, you’re not as banal as that, are you? Childhood hurts? Midnight terrors? How boring. What a disappointment.”

Somewhere, not very deep inside her, is the capacity to silence these insinuations. _This is the Doctor_, she thinks carefully. _Don’t forget it._

“I’d so very much like to hear what you would do to this body if you felt at liberty. I could tell you his thoughts on yours. Hey! An exchange of ideas!”

She’s halfway to her feet before she thinks it through. But maybe she could silence him, just a little. 

“Yes, yes, oh, yes, that’s so good. Very high marks for cruelty and power and ruthlessness. You’ve always had such commitment to the idealism of force. I’m a huge fan, I want you to know.”

When Missy sinks back to the stone step, he laughs. His mouth twists. “What’s a Time Lord? Time Lords are small.”

“Enough!” Missy doesn’t know if she’s feigning boredom, or if she’s giving in, so soon, or if she’s tired of listening to someone else’s monologue. “What is it you actually want?”

That grin again. “I already have it. Your fear.”

The Master’s been afraid before. But never, before, for the Doctor.

Never like this. Missy _isn’t_ sure that she can save him.

“Doctor.” She puts her hand on his calf. 

He glances down, and in that moment she sees the Doctor as he was at her latest execution, his hand on the lever. The sentence that brought them to this. She’d begged him. She hadn’t known, then, that he’d already rigged the device, and had thought his caginess unease shared at what it had been so thoroughly designed to do. 

How difficult it had been to approach it, knowing the blunt permanence of its effects. And the promise of a thousand years—though half-conscious, she’d heard the grief in his words, seen the burden already heavy on his shoulders. 

But that apparatus had been elegant and clean. In spite of her blubbering, that device had had dignity in mind. Though the false death had stung, enough so that she’d teased him, much later, that he’d indulged in the opportunity, when a less convincing display—one that had let her in on the joke, perhaps—would have done, and though that cool morning had been full of the complicated things between them, no one had compelled them to perform those feelings. It had been no puppet theatre. What they’d felt was theirs, unstrung. Unwitnessed, almost.

In this moment of connection, too, what they feel is theirs, real. And if it’s mostly dread—the Doctor’s dread strangled and pumped up and fueling the crawling thing feeding in their heads—it’s they who are feeling it.

“Don’t be afraid,” she says. 

He exhales, a little puff of incredulity, a true if truncated laugh. 

“I know; it’s that easy.” She is sardonic, acknowledging the impossibility of the solution. “Just do it, and we can go.”

“How about if you beg?” he says. 

_If you like_, she thinks, then tamps down emphatically on the memory. 

“It won’t be clean here,” he says, his lips full of satisfaction around the words, “with me.”

She’s got miles of corridors and doors she can close against the creature, bunkers and cellars and trap doors weighted shut by sod, but if she slams them all, the Doctor will be left out there for the hungry thing to devour.

“Just take my hand,” she tries again.

“All right. Why not?” The Doctor bends down, and she can see how much he wants to let her help him. But when their hands meet, she can’t move him. His grip is stone. His mind is unreachable. 

“These gloves,” he explains. “_You_ understand.”

It’s absurd. All the powers of Time Lord telepathy, of Time Lord mind connecting to Time Lord mind, almost more natural than having bodies at all, and one porous layer of knit textile, so fine an insect could have shrouded itself in it, is enough to get in their way. 

He tightens his grip, and she winces before he lets go. 

He sets his hand on the top of her head, a proprietary, custodial pat. He entangles his fingers in her hair. She closes her eyes, just for a heartsbeat and the span of a breath. 

“You should go,” he says, strained. “I want you to go. Take my TARDIS. Take Bill and Nardole to safety. I want you to do that. I want...you to try to be good.”

It ought to be a code-word, _try to be good_, knowing she’ll do no such thing. 

“I’m going to stop fighting it,” he says, “and when I do—”

His hand fists in her hair.

When he speaks again, he has become something new, not the demon and not the Doctor, the Doctor and not the Doctor. “The thing is...I _want_ you to stay. But you know that already, don’t you? I don’t want to be left here, no one does. The shadows are lonely. And they feel...they feel too much. You should stay. Here, with me, forever. What’s one prison compared to another? Here, I wouldn’t try to change you anymore. I could help you make him, help me, understand. Think of the things that we could do.”

He moves, it seems without import or intention, closer to her, relaxing his grip. She leans back against his leg. It’s warm and soothing, if she doesn’t think about being kicked. It reminds her that there’s more than one kind of touch. That there are other ways to reach him than by clasping his hand. 

It’s what she’ll have to do. 

She gives herself time to gather herself, to take a few shallow breaths before the one full, propulsive, last, decisive breath. She sits up and turns and lifts her face to him. 

She raises her eyes and her hand, up his body, to his eyes, up his leg, the beginning of a seduction. “I’m tired of being locked up, too,” she says, “all alone.”

It almost doesn’t seem possible that he would take the bait so easily, that he would open his mouth and let her feed it to him, her own weight on the snare. She isn’t sure whether it’s the Doctor or the remanent who is so painfully eager. He urges her, gathering her, his hand cupped to the back of her head, up onto her knees. She rubs her nose against his trousers. He widens his stance, tilts his hips—backwards, but this is the Doctor; this is a Doctor who curls inward at his most intense.

She unbuckles his belt and opens his flies and she coaxes him out and she works diligently. All the time in the vault she could have done just this and didn’t is an asceticism she only half chose. The hand, still gloved, on the back of her head is a reminder, as if the hewn stone chilly beneath her knees, the corner of the platform’s edge sharp against her palms isn’t a reminder, as if the obscurity of the muffled chamber and the unbreathed air shut up in it and the subterranean creepy-crawly tunneling in her consciousness aren’t more than reminder enough of the significance of what she’s doing.

He lets her labour at it longer than is comfortable, longer, it’s clear, than is necessary. His other hand is clenched at his side, his bent fingers shifting in their rigid row. He’s staring down at her, fascinated and appalled and seeming to not want to be looking at her at all. 

Nothing changes in his face when he brings the horseshoe of his hand to the front of her throat. He pushes up and in and squeezes thumb and forefinger. It’s such a slender little neck, she thinks, easy to get his hands around. It’d be easy to choke and strangle and snap and break. He could wring her like a chicken. Lovely neck. 

No, she thinks, no, if you’re going to do that, better to do it at the right moment, inside her where he can feel it. 

The Doctor can’t hear her right now, but the other thing can. It’s interested in what she’s suggesting. 

“Take off your gloves,” she tries to say. Instead, he lifts her, half floating and half stumbling to her feet. Shoves her onto the stone altar. He pins her against it with alien, casual ease, his hip pressed into her belly. 

He runs his thumbs across her eyelids, down her nose, over her lips. When he pushes them past her teeth, into the corners of her mouth, she shouldn’t be surprised. It’s what she would have done to him. 

The fabric tastes of must and dusty stone. Her jaw, already sore, rebels. She takes hold of his wrists, and he lets her force his hands away. 

She brushes his cheek. He turns his face into her touch. He closes his eyes. He pushes blindly and softly against her, like he’s nuzzling her with his body, the need she’s encouraged insistent and—she can feel it in her mind now—demanding. His buckle, loose, digs into her. 

“Why try so hard?” he says, “don’t. It isn’t as though you believe in this goodness, or the project, or in our pledge to it, to the pact. It was a trap, and it’s a prison. I mean, look at what it’s making you let me do to you.”

His hands go to her waist. He drops her embroidered girdle to the side, draws the ribbon at her collar in his delicate way like the ends of a bow on a package, slips her buttons out of their holes to push her shirt from her shoulders, and then unfastens her skirt, lets the layers pool at her feet in thick billows. 

To her dismay, he pulls back, away, out of reach. 

“Step out of those. And your bloomers, please.”

She does as she’s told, after which she is unveiled to his gaze; she knows that her skin, like his gloves, stands out stark against the black materials that cover her from her armpits to her toes. 

He traces a finger along the top of her corset as though along the top of a mantle. He touches the hard boning of the corset and the soft sheath of her tights. He slides his belt out of its loops in one long tug. He wraps it around her wrists and inserts the tail through the buckle frame and brings her wrists together with it. When she wafts this makeshift restraint up and down, testing the Doctor’s work, and they can see it’s going to come undone, he jerks it tight. He forces the prong of the buckle through the material, punching through to fasten it. 

He considers her in her undergarments, his brow furrowed. 

He disappears into the murk. 

On the far side of the cave, the TARDIS still hasn’t dematerialised, but she is very carefully not thinking about the TARDIS. 

He’s back just as suddenly, holding a beautiful object. It’s pale green stone intricately decorated, gleaming black stone meticulously honed, its shine after so long only marred by the stains imbrued into its handle carvings, mortar for its thirst. He pushes the flat of its all but invisible blade, suggestively angled, into the seam of her tights. It feels colder than it is, picking up her heat quickly as though warming to a thought. 

She has no need to wonder if its edge is still sharp. Before she does, the Doctor slices through the fabric, just a sweep of his arm and then another; then he turns her around and does the same again. The scraps drift away, mere wisps. 

Now she _is_ exposed. 

Again, she has no time to contemplate—his hand reaches between her legs and his fingers find her unprepared. Satin as his gloves feel to the face, they abrade pushing into her, and she hisses. In any case, this isn’t what she’s looking for. This isn’t the contact she’s trying to coax from him.

She squirms away, vexed, and half turns, straining to look at him. “Take those off,” she says, too aggrieved to couch it as a temptation. 

He scowls because he doesn’t like to be ordered, but then he shrugs, the smile returning that makes something sink in her, queasy. 

“All right, if you insist.” He tugs at the tips of a glove, stretching them past his fingers before pulling it off his hand. He removes the other glove as carefully and as crisply and sets them aside with the knife. “It’s more fun without them, as you say.”

It isn’t much better as his fingers knead their way back into her, but his skin is his skin, and her nerves come alive to it, his touch what she has been trying to get from him for longer than she would like to acknowledge. When he moves past teasing and fingertips and pushes knuckles-deep, his thumb rubbing, her body is finally responding as she’d counted on, and she allows it to carry her where mind is too besieged to go. 

He twists his wrist out of its awkward position and plugs his thumb into her arse.

She grits her teeth against the exclamation. 

“You ought to let it go. You’ll find it liberating. Or, no. You need it drawn out of you, correct? Pride, Missy; is that what it is?”

She scoffs. “You’re the one who needs drawn out.”

“Bend over.”

She’s reluctant to place her hands on the stone. She knows it will pull her fast to it as soon as she lets it near. It’s crowded with the trauma of memory, and it knows the weight of other stones, too: stones for drowning, fastened to wrists; stones that crush and break, pressed on top of other stones or single ones lifted over heads or many thrown by many hands; small stones, a pile of pebbles swallowed one by one; stones set over the mouths of holes to make them inescapable. The repetition of generations is its gravity; procession, ritual, forfeit, fear: ruthless; force and strength, and, willing or unwilling, blood, hot and ferrous and wet, fast at first, and later congealing, later still crumbling to powder. It might not be older than her people, but it is older than her self, and as such it is bigger than she is. It will eat her up. If she lets it have her, they are all lost, for keeps. 

But if she doesn’t let it have her, the Doctor alone will be lost, and she can’t have that. Besides, _hadn’t_ she better do as she’s told? He’s teaching her to be good…

“You’re not good,” he—the creature—says. “You were never going to be _good_.”

He twirls a free finger through a strand of hair at the nape of her neck, so gentle it could be the first night, when he put her into the vault, still so weak and grateful. As he does this, he continues to massage her from the inside, pushing her implacably, _come here, come here._ The pincer of his hand searches for itself, trying to close itself inside her. 

“The closest you can come is to mimic what the Doctor does. The best that you can apprehend goodness is obedience. If that’s what you want...I’m giving it to you. I know you don’t like for things to be so easy. Suffering is, yes, very beautiful. I know you’re much more than that, but it could be so simple. So elegant. Wouldn’t you like that? I’d like to think you would.”

_This is a dangerous game_, she thinks, and then laughs at herself for having wanted to think otherwise.

He pulls his fingers out of her, and she’s distraught as, for a wild moment, she thinks she’s missed her chance to reach him. 

“I won’t hurt you any more than he ever has, you know that. Arms down to the block. Do it now.”

The stone is buffed almost into translucency despite the blackness of the rock it’s made of. It's dimpled in the centre from the long line of victims who have rubbed it raw as they struggled or shivered or thrashed. She can’t help tensing once she’s touching it. She wants to get away from it. She’s combating with all her will the impulse to recoil.

“Is it kinder to let you think you could?” the Doctor asks.

“You’re asking me?”

He hesitates. A strange uncertainty enters his voice. “Yes.”

He’s so remote, the noisy shadows piling in between them, like the rabble at a hanging. She breathes, three breaths, four, her chest expanding and contracting conspicuously, making them as steady as she can. She wants to tell him the truth, whatever it is. 

“I’m not certain,” she says at last. She drops her head, lets it hang. “But…touch me now, Doctor, please.”

He puts one hand on her bare shoulder, with the other adjusts himself, aligns himself, trailing through her—she is so wet now—as he spreads her, and then he is pulling her to him and pushing into her, and she gasps, an involuntary sound high pitched and wrapped in air, and he brings the other hand to her other shoulder so that he’s grasping them like the handles of the pump that detonates an explosive, the pads below his thumbs curled over her back, his fingernails claws on her collarbones. 

_Doctor…_

But the vicious, viscous, enraged hunger is everywhere, so densely tucked into the Doctor, such an insidious, liquid trickle in every empty space, Missy can’t be sure it isn’t his real emotion. Worse, it makes her wonder—it’s so familiar, tar that’s already on her feet. Are those racing heartsbeats distress, or are they desire? If this is a desperate rescue, who is the one in danger? 

Has she ever wanted to be good, or better? Has she ever wanted to be saved?

What is pleasure, anyway, but expectation?

Her shoulders are sharp and freckled and beautiful, and he is going to rake his fingers through her and rip out the thing that makes her, and then they will be happy, and then they’ll say it was possible, and they’ll know because they did it. And bent over the altar she is beautiful, the back of her neck an exposed column, strong and vulnerable with the blood pulsing in it, and her waist in its dark bracket, and her arse against his hip bones, full of the warmth of living flesh. 

And the ache of his body inside hers, is that beauty? If it isn't, was it beauty the other way around? 

_Doctor…_

It was never like this in the past. The priest wore a stone phallus, yes, carved with a swirl of figures that caught the equinox light from the careful casements near the ceiling and impressed the gathered people. But unlike the altar and the knife, that object never touched flesh or saw blood, and certainly never dipped into a wet, organic orifice and held its tissues spread apart. 

This is what she'd do to his body: she'd find the phallus forgotten and upright in the corner and she’d place him over it and ask him to lower himself onto it. And then while his thighs began to quiver, she would stand above him and stroke his cheek and touch his back and feel for his hearts with the palm of her hand on the skin of his chest. She would walk away and leave him there waiting for her, wondering if she was watching him while he waited, wondering. 

He would look up at her, and he would say nothing, but when he saw that she had returned, he would sob, once, almost, only just, and she would know all of what he'd felt. 

The Doctor pulls out of her, curt, rough, too quickly. But they are all together in their minds now, the Doctor and Missy and the presence in the cave that is more than just an echo.

He stretches around her to unfasten the belt. Her wrists throb, a brief, brilliant flare.

“Get up, climb up on to the table, on your hands and knees. I want to see you.”

He backs away, his hands behind his back. Missy stands up and considers the dimensions of the altar, the parameters of his instruction and her willingness to follow them. 

“The other way if you need to. Facing me.”

She manoeuvres to the side of the block so that it is longer than it is wide. Hopping up is easy enough with a push of her arms, but the top of it is narrow, the surface too smooth where it is worn, rough where it is not. Her laces in their eyelets press against her shins, uncomfortable, slippery. Rearranging herself atop this cake stand is awkward and ungainly; the effect is to make her too aware of herself, too cognizant of how she must appear, free stacking as though she’s been trained for it, wearing nothing but her corset and her boots. 

There is, of course, a very large part of her that balks at all of this. That cannot allow herself to be on display like this. 

The Doctor paces around her at more than a little distance, his attention acute and serious and observant. He stops in front of her and comes up to her to take her chin in his hand. 

She thinks this will be about her mouth again. 

Instead, he draws her chin to the left, a gentle motion that turns her head, and with it, her centre of gravity shifts, her weight easing off her right arm. He nudges her elbow, and she picks up the arm entirely, and lets him resettle it forward, on the raw edge of the stone. Then he pulls her head towards him. His touch is light and precise. His fingers grip her chin, but he applies only enough pressure to position her when she doesn’t oppose him. She lets her body move as though on a fulcrum. He stretches her forward. There’s nowhere else for her hands to go, so in following she elongates her body, her spine long to emphasise the coil of her back.

She crowds her awareness into a smaller and smaller field, into the circle that contains just the two of them, so that she can pretend that the excruciating attention is just his, that there’s no one else, anywhere, and the universe consists solely of two Time Lords, more alike than they are different, unconcerned with that outside their universe. Ambition, adventure, audience dissolve in the shrinking periphery as air does at the boundary formed by a forcefield. In this way she can let him arrange her as he will, place her where he wants her, how he wants her, as he’s always wanted. 

He finds the wire pins that restrain her hair and pulls them out. He clips them to her lower lip, and this, too, is something the Master might have done to the Doctor once, the taste of someone human on the metal prongs. Her hair’s been in its plume for so long it’s too gnarled to tumble freely, but he puts his hand in it and loosens it and brings it down past her chest, his fist around it combing it into place. 

They regard one another. 

She has to look up at him to do it. Always, she’s looking up at him, his eyes hooded. 

What does he see, what does he see?

He fusses at her hair, tucking stray strands away. When he traces the semicircle curve of the cartilage of her auricle a shudder goes through her, abrupt and impossible to suppress.

“The shell of your ear,” he says. “Do you think it’s possible that we could hear the sea in it?” 

It isn’t impossible. Sealed away for millennia, a cave can remember the caressing intrusion of water. On a mountaintop, you could dream of oceans. 

“When we were very young, I admired you, more than anything.”

“I know.”

Walking along her flank, he traces his palm down her spine from the nape past the wings of her scapulae, past her ribs, into the dip and rise of her lower back and sacrum. When he is behind her, his hand becomes once again just fingertips, his touch now a tender contrast to the brusque way he’d treated her before.

“Then, when we were really not as much older as I thought, I despised you.”

“Yes.”

He draws circles and lines invisibly on her skin, writing secret messages in the script of thought. He follows the sphere of her buttock to the inside of her thigh, to contemplative up and down strokes, led by his wrist. She feels her mouth open; she holds her head high; she trains her focus deep into the glow on the other side of the cave, looking past, somewhere interior.

But when he bites her, pinching a delicate fold in his teeth and applying enough pressure to bruise, the surprise almost undoes her careful, patient cultivation. Anger erupts in her at the indignity of contorting herself for a Doctor so deliberately foolhardy and filled with so many covert crevices that the stone would choose his soul over hers.

_Oh, but it would have them both, if she'd like it._

The anger itself is like a bruise, bitter and astringent with this unwanted conclusion about herself: lock her in a cage for a few decades, and look what she's willing to do for him. Touch her just a little, and watch her unfurl, dropping her skirts, dripping. 

_It would keep them both forever, if she'd let it._

He pets the spot he’s just bitten. Then he's back at it with his mouth, worrying at the fragile, flushing skin, moving to where she's more sensitive, tugging with his lips and his tongue and his teeth until she’s all but mewling. But when the sound that is almost a whimper escapes her, he withdraws his touch, and the heat of his face. 

“One day, I found I hated myself more.”

She feels the tug when he hooks his fingers under the heel of her shoe, lifting one leg and then the other and setting them down farther apart to open up the space between them. 

“But you, my dear, aren't so squeamish. No, you wouldn't mind if yours were the hand that held the knife. You would never pause to feel something about all those breakable people pleading up on the block, bleeding, begging, bright with mortal desperation. No feelings the Doctor would believe in.”

Something solid and cylindrical against her skin. The stone knife. Someone dug it up and shaped it and polished it once, long ago, and taught it to kill. Now it is learning new things from these abominable aliens, full of atrocities. 

“But you don't mind, do you, Missy? It's just a game. A way to humour the Doctor until a means of besting him comes along. Until something better, and you can go your way again, alone. Free.”

There’s pressure but no slicing, no parting, no rip. She closes her eyes and follows the line of his voice into his point of view. He’s holding the knife at the choil, his wrist perilously near the blade, a threat intended for her by the thing driving him. He’s tracing the rounded hilt over the creases at the tops of her thighs, dragging wet strands from fold to fold of her, pushing the handle, insinuatingly, into her, just dipping into one part of her and then another. 

“He may need you, but you! You know better. After all, you are better than he is. You’re his superior. You're the stuff of promise and expectation. What is he? Nobody. Just a name he’s made up of the things he’s done. You let him talk you out of what was yours, long ago. And now? Now, when he wants to hurt you, you let him.”

He flips the knife, and something loosens in her, but she doesn’t know if it’s relief for his safety or alarm for herself. But the knife withdraws, the Doctor with it, stretching away so that her sight returns to herself. 

“I told you that your death in this cave wouldn't be a clean one, but no one ever twisted the knife as he does, no one ever offered herself with such perverse complicity. You learned that from him. It's all you can learn. You know you could never learn goodness, you know you can't cry real tears. What good is goodness anyway, what do you care that you can't learn it?”

He steps into the light. 

“You're not even trying.”

Having made his way in front of her, the Doctor falls silent, his silhouette triumphant or seized with despair, picked out in the pulsating glow, in the difficult light of which she can just make out his clenched jaw and wonder whether it is her own thought that has time to marvel at how pretty he is, how this anguish of theirs moves her. 

“If you stop fighting me, I can make it easier for both of you.”

He shrugs off his jacket, methodical, sneering. There's no physical reason she should be shaking—her body will do this for as long as she needs it to, or close enough—but the sour quiver of fatigue makes its way along her muscles nonetheless, her limbs weak, her shoulders and hips stiff with a distancing ache. 

Somebody speaks, then, and it might be memory or imagination, captor or captive or neither of the above. It could be a dream. It could be hallucination. It doesn't matter, it's all the same. 

“Let me help you.”

The Doctor sinks slowly to his haunches until it’s he who’s looking up at her. He removes the pins from her lip and drops them to the cave floor. 

He kisses her, and then after that when her lips are still learning to remember the feel of his lips, he kisses her again, this time his gentle kiss, the chaste and sweet kiss. 

_Doctor!_

Somewhere, there is terror. Somewhere, the horror of beings under the control of other beings, all the while wondering of whose pleasure they are really in pursuit. There’s repugnance deeply ingrained of a temporal body on display in all its material reality and the contrast of the fluid between her legs with the blood clean and waiting inside her. 

The Doctor’s smile, appearing at the moment he straightens, toothy and full of gums and widening the corners of his mouth could be a grimace. 

There’s power, always power: between them and in the temple-cave and out there, in every exchange, every transaction, every touch. There’s someone standing over someone else with a knife in his hand—and a voice whispering and shouting in his head, suckling on that feeling. 

The emotion in the Doctor’s eyes doesn’t match his mouth, and Missy wishes she could look away. She doesn’t want to see any of the things she sees in it. 

“What would the Master do?” he wonders in his quietest voice.

He slaps her. Not hard enough to threaten her position on the plinth, but enough to make her grip its surface with tight, tense hands. 

Pity is one of those incongruous things she doesn’t want to see, and remorse. It would be easier if he were only stern, only sadistic, only relentless in his hunt for her undoing. She doesn’t want to see torment. She doesn’t want to see the taut pinch at the corners of his eyes or the bright wateriness in them when they widen. 

She’s losing command of this situation, if she ever had any at all. It’s time to end it. 

She blinks away her shock. She swallows. 

“Do it again,” she says. 

The startlement washes over him first, followed by confusion, finally a sort of frowning resolve. A series of very small slaps, then, one after another, growing sharper until they’re both panting, each momentary contact like a garish bar of light flashing and fading so that with her gulped breath she is crying out for him, because he’s _there_ and he’s not, and she feels the frustration all through her, and she realises with a start that it’s his frustration as much as it is hers. 

She reaches for him, hooks an arm around his neck to pull him to her, drawing his head close to hers. He puts his hands on her face, his thumbs by her ears, his forehead against hers. Four heartbeats pound within the space between them. He is pointing a gun he loathes to the head of someone he loathes (and loves) more. She is laughing as she dances through the rays of a frantic energy weapon. 

She strokes her palm over his cheek to find she’s left a smear of blood like paint across his skin. She’s cut herself on the stone’s edge. He takes her hand in both of his and licks the livid wound. He presses her palm, with her blood and his saliva, onto the surface of the stone. 

He could split her open and spill her all over it, right now, no more waiting, no more games. She’d spill out everywhere, wet and hot and pulsing, spasming and staining, arched, her throat and her chest and her belly exposed to him, and beyond the pleasure and then the blood there would be another spilling, in the light of which the altar would shine again as when the sun had touched it, long ago, on the perfect days. 

And afterwards they could do it again, again in the aftermath, remade, renewed, reborn, a succession of lives which if kept carefully could last the thirsty stone an eternity. They could take turns. She could instruct him as he has tried to teach her, and her lessons for him, entombed together like this, sooner or later would be welcome. There could be others, too, sometimes, occasionally—there is the TARDIS, and even when it is emptied, there is a way for a chamber that has been cordoned by rockfall and folded deep under the ground to not be cut off at all, to be opened without opening. _All of time and all of space._

There could be such pleasure. There would be so much joy, and pain, and terror. Emotion such as this cave has not seen for far too long would echo about its walls. Sacrifice would heap on sacrifice as these creatures the Time Lords threw themselves onto the block over and over, each for the other, to save one another, to spare one another what neither seeks to be spared at all. No, they crave it. They crave it as much as the stone does. 

That is what it hears in the rhythm of her blood and the taste of his thoughts in her head. 

It’s time for that interesting suggestion.

The invisible hand closes on Missy’s throat, lifting her off her hands and knees. She struggles not to kick out as she rises into the air, choking, her limbs like a marionette’s. 

“Stop!” the Doctor shouts, and it drops her supine onto the saddle of the stone. 

She is so ready for him she could fit his whole body inside hers. He pushes up at the crooks of her knees, and she wraps strong legs around him and positions the backs of her heels against his bottom and the small of his back and presses him to her. He fumbles momentarily, searching, before slipping into her, past the boundary of her, through what separates her from him, slick, and when they feel the pressure all around and surrounding and profoundly interior, they groan, in tandem, their voices blending and bouncing and at length absorbing in the rock walls of the listening cave. 

The invisible hand is like many hands, and multiplied over time and through memory, they take her wrists, they spread her arms wide along the plinth like the wings of a specimen, fingers stretched to their tips, pinning her, holding her down. She can feel their stroking whispers all over her mind, finally, the voices that have seduced the Doctor with their cruel ropes, that have bound him with their relentless prying, and that she has been fighting to keep at bay, for his sake as much as for her own. 

He curls over her as he works himself almost out of and again into her, jolting the air out of her on the return, and it is all she can do in between to balance herself against the tearing strain on her arms, her arse suspended in the air, clasping onto him with her legs. They are full of the physical fact of a body inside another body, and they are alight in the glare of every memory the entity is determined to know, all of them at once, more than either can bear to contain because it’s true, Time Lords are too small, and they have spent the latter spans of their lives running away from precisely this, trying not to think, trying not to contemplate, trying not to remember. Underneath it all there is still the appalled, reluctant, panicked _wanting_ of the Doctor, who has yearned to touch her for so long, and disciplined himself against it, who has also for so long—perhaps since always—desired to take her in a strict hand and squeeze, just a little. 

He goes motionless in her, but then he grabs her hair—he has the knife once more in his right hand, and she sees that it was fashioned from one strange rock, both nephrite and obsidian, an impossible amalgam part ceremony, part butchery. The pale handle and body, so incongruous in this cave of mafic, volcanic rock, gives way to quick-cooled and glassy blade, full of conchoidal teeth, knapped and bloodthirsty. This is the knife that has filled the channels with the blood of eons. This is the fear that has screamed itself into the crystal of the rock itself. This is the play they will re-enact, the tableau they're placed to play.

He skims the forefinger of his knife hand like a feather over her throat.

“I could make him slice you open. Or I could plunge this knife into your chest, one heart at a time.”

He’s the Doctor, and so her impulse is to beg, but some bravado hasn't deserted her, some pride is making a last stand—she smiles now, a little crookedly, suppressing the grunt as he pushes as deep as he can, pulling on her hair, his face over hers. 

“Go on, then, I dare you,” she says, breathless and full of defiance. 

But when he releases her, suddenly stricken, the hand with the knife in it shaking, it's the surprise that cuts. It’s the reminder that he is the Doctor, that to do what she is suggesting now, like this, would destroy him. He covers his mouth, as though he’s trying to suppress all the worst things, as though they're trying to come up his esophagus out of him and he's swallowing and swallowing, packing it down, down…it’s terrible to see the devastation and despair of him, who nevertheless refuses to let go. 

He's hoarse, hopeless. 

“I told you to leave me. I told you to run.”

“Never.”

She wants more than anything to take his hand. She wrests her arm free of the clutching shadows, ignoring screaming tendons, and wraps her fingers over his, calming the tremor. 

“I’m here,” she says. “It’s my choice. You don’t send me away like one of your pets that needs protecting, not when you— Your thousand years aren’t up yet, not nearly, and I already said I’m not the one who runs.”

“It’s so strong,” he tells her, “so much darkness drawing on the dark in me. You’re very distant…”

She wriggles against him, proof that she’s not as far away as he feels. He responds almost automatically, rocking. Pleasure delivers dutifully: the shared images between them sharpen, and if it’s all a litany of pain, vivid flashbacks of destruction and judgment and lives and worlds and timelines truncated, then something here is deriving satisfaction from it, that thing is feeding into the organic responses of their bodies its own pleasure; this slideshow of all the worst things, from which even she, who would have laughed once, wants to withdraw, feels perversely good. 

He covers her mouth with the hand he’d used to cover his. He covers her eyes. He takes his hand away again and touches her clavicle, her breast, half clothed, and the unguarded expanse below her corset. He touches her where they meet with the pads of three fingers, finally thrusting in full cadence, and at this rate he really will spill her onto the stone, but the knife is too close, it’s too much out of his control, and she hasn’t forgotten the threat of what might happen—of what the devil riding him wants him to do to her—when he does. 

Lovely body. Lovely blood pounding in the body, and this other, novel promise of phoenix miracles. They’re a brace of phoenixes, trussed by their feet, hanging from a game hook in a larder. 

She takes the knife too easily from weak and yielding fingers. Immediately turns it on the Doctor, point under his tilted chin. She tastes the spike of them at the same time, warring and coexisting: the static stink of apprehension and the idiotic, impatient _end-it_ that’s half about martyring himself and half about release, still with him though it’s dressed up nowadays as service, as humility. But what is she going to do with it? Even as she plays at having gained the advantage, she’s unwilling to use it for real, to bring its razor edge to bear, not under conditions of such imprecision. 

Something very quick happens. A crack, felt by both, or heard, her hand jarringly useless, his closed on her forearm and fingers, jerkily letting go. Her eyelids flutter. He catches the knife. The rest comes without sequence: his face, ferocious and wild; also his face, agonised and so upset; the thing that might be called pain that is her body registering what has been done to it, radiating through her from a sudden scintillant centre somewhere she can’t pinpoint; the knife protruding high in her chest; with only the grip visible the blade embedded to the hilt. And she can’t quite breathe…

Someone is gasping, little hiccoughing sounds that after three or four repetitions subsides. 

“What happens to the knife if he leaves it in there while you regenerate?” The Doctor’s voice is savage, raw, and contemptuous, battling itself and losing ground and smug about it. “What happens to him if I hold him in you?”

She closes her eyes, concentrating what reserves, what defences she has remaining into the channel between them. Let not these straits be flooded or drained, not by a wave, not by the shifting mass of land, not by an eruption, whatever its fearsome magnitude. Now and throughout this spectacle what she has been most afraid of—and she has been afraid, yes, in this their tormentor has been most effective—is losing him. So she’s not going to regenerate, not from a wound like this, not when she loves this body, not when she loves, traitorous thought, this life with him. 

“We’re not finished, yet, my dear.”

She opens her eyes in time to watch him pull the knife out of her. It's, it's, oh—. Blood follows the blade to flow where it was always going to flow, onto the stone, and when it does the beating howling amplifies, loud and scorching and it feels, there it is again, wrongly, so good. It shouldn’t feel good because this is her destruction, but it’s all-encompassing, and somewhere within it there is the beginning, their beginning, a high desert and the clear, thin air and a view of stars and the languid urgency of youth, and too there are all the crowded seething sultry layers since that are the real reason they are so irresistible to this grotesque hallucinatory tyrant made of heat and pressure and madness, and in there is the Doctor’s belief that if they are together they can best it, and if they can’t win they’ll go down together, the only way they're able, and be it the best that they can do, they will save, they will spare, they will sate the hunger here for as long as they can last. 

And he’ll have what he can’t otherwise have, however long he tries to keep her: that’s what the stone would give him. 

He’s stroking her, inside and out, and she’s giving the feeling back to him, and the thing in the cave is striking them together over and over as though to fracture them, like flints, lithic, and through him she feels the familiar tightening, the too-tight tightening. 

She spills over before he does, airless already from the puncture to her lung, the shallowness tipping into blind nothing; she exits herself, she is fully in him, clinging to control while it fills him, resisting the knife he’s bringing to her jugular. He roars; she is making some sound beyond her own hearing; she can’t stop coming, and it _hurts_, and he’s carried along with it, and she’s skimming consciousness; he raises the knife above her and he brings it down and he thrusts it into the altar and snaps it, pieces skittering into the shadows. 

The stone shrieks.

He collapses down in a pile on top of her, his strings cut. 

His shoulders begin to tremble. 

She’s not a doctor, and she’s no human companion who knows with such guileless facility what to do for him. She knows only to ease herself up carefully when she can and put her arm around him, to hem his to his sides, encircling, holding him so that he can cry. His tears fall on her cheek, the back of her neck, the stone, the dark spot like the first drop of rain in a storm that will wash away the old blood and its memories. She lets her own join his, where he can’t see it; it’s safe enough, now, to leave this part of themselves here. 

He will try to say he’s sorry—this is how it works—but what forgiveness is here they cannot talk about, only tell each other in touch, in mind. And what is there to forgive? He became magma, he became lava so that she could save him. He was molten in her arms, and it burned her to hold him as he metamorphosed, and only she knew his true form when the voices muttered butcher, monster, esretu, teind, and it seared into her the brand that was already outlined in the shape of him. He would have done the same for her. He’s pulled her from her mount, and let her storm and strike and rage and ravage, and waited for her transformation. She became a snake and an eagle and a red-hot coal, and he was faithful. She became a cinder, she became a worm, and he was patient. 

They don’t linger as long as they ought; later, they’ll say it was because they didn’t want to spend any more time at the site of such trauma, with danger still a possibility and bodies requiring tending to. They’ll say they’re fine. They will be. 

He removes himself stiffly from her arms, gets her down from the plinth, much too gentle. She tries to shoo him away while she gathers her clothes, but when she finds she has to let him help her, she allows him to hold her skirt for her, to lay his jacket over her shoulders. She folds his discarded gloves into one of its pockets. They’re grey with dust from the basaltic rock. He’s on his knees to search for each dropped pin. 

She can feel her jaw slacken despite the tension she’s put in it. The lightheadedness. The already stained spot on the Doctor’s jacket. She takes careful breaths as they pick their way across the chamber.

Bill and Nardole are very carefully not looking too much or too little at them when the Doctor and Missy re-enter the TARDIS control room. But the viewscreen is still running. What could they have done? They couldn’t have left him, anymore than she could have, and she’d locked them in, to keep them safe. 

The Doctor doesn’t seem to care much who is not making eye contact with whom as he all but carries her to a chair. The single skirt she’s wearing sticks to her as she props herself as straight as she can in the seat. It’s wet in a way that makes her deeply uncomfortable. She's leaking everywhere, it's a travesty. She cradles her arm close like she must conceal her weakness. She doesn’t want to touch or be touched by anything but also she wants to lie down and let the land hide her in a field of tall, red grass.

“I’m going to have to take the jacket,” he says when he returns with a very worn-looking and half-used box of Gallifreyan medical supplies. He rummages in it almost absent-mindedly. 

“Okay.” 

“Look at me. Missy.”

She looks up at him, sees how he’s trying to be the Doctor and how difficult it is right now. 

He searches her face for a long time. “Thank you,” he says. He frowns over the things they can’t, won’t say.

She didn’t have to go back. She could have left him. She could have got away. But of course she had to go back—it wasn’t that it was kind, only that it was necessary. Is this what goodness is? She had wanted him as the stone did. He had been keeping her as the stone would have done. And as for this pain, well, she’s been stabbed in one of her hearts—almost—hasn’t she? That she should feel pain is hardly worth noting.

“You knew when you came back for me—” 

She stills him; at least he’s left her with one hand to use, to lay on his. 

“Everything you’ve done. I’ve seen now. Everything I’ve done. Now, you’ve seen.” But it isn’t enough for him, that’s clear. “Our crimes. The damage we’ve caused, called necessity, or need. Your War and mine. You wanted me to understand.”

“And do you?” he asks, and his yearning pierces her. His vulnerability, now he is just the Doctor.

“Do _you_ understand?”

She blenches, blinks, ducks her head. He looks suddenly at the box, like he’s only just remembered he’s meant to be performing first aid. 

He doesn’t take away his jacket after all, only moves it aside to clear the space above her heart. The jagged mouth he’s made there bubbles mutely. He doesn’t seem to know what to do. She watches his face as he looks at what he’s done to her. He hovers over the cut and his expression is focussed and also furtive, and when the wound warms, singing to him, to the secret glow under his palm, Missy’s eyes widen. Fury washes over her, and with it the vigor to knock him away.

“Sir,” Nardole interjects. He’s agonisingly, uncharacteristically deferential. 

He points out the implement right at the top of the pile. “You can use this one. And then that one to help the broken bone start knitting. Sorry.” He glances at the viewscreen, and at Bill.

The Doctor inhales and wipes his nose. “Right. Yes. Uhm, Nardole, Bill, could you…”

Bill is quick to cooperate. “We’ll be below.”

“No, stay,” Missy says, though they don’t seem particularly real at the moment. “He’d like—he’d like you to stay.”

They’ll try to be alone. To drag themselves off into their dens, aloof and evasive. To do this like Time Lords. Like themselves. Private and isolated, in a little hell not so unlike the one they’ve escaped. They shouldn’t. 

The Doctor’s touch is just his touch when he rests his fingers in the hollow above her sternum. Missy puts her head back as he ministers to her, and it feels like she’s raising it for the first time. His thoughts are the familiar voice in the other room, the persistent, searching, deep-feeling ramble on the far side of the door, now a bit more bruised, the boy on the next bench over sneaking glances behind their tutors’ backs, long ago. 

The colours in the TARDIS shift and warm. The light moves into a longer spectrum. The gravity settles. The air changes, like a current is blowing through on which there is always the suggestion of snow. 

When the TARDIS dematerialises, some time later, the planet they leave behind them quakes. The Doctor, watching this destruction by himself in the console room, smiles, toggles off the viewscreen, picks up his top hat, puts it on his head, and wanders down the stairs and through a corridor, his hands in his trousers pockets.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Shalkaverse short story ["The Feast of the Stone"](http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/vampires/newstory/scottwright.shtml), 1996 children's science fiction drama [_Delta Wave_](https://youtu.be/NHqVJHVeBpE?t=666), formative Tam Lin retelling _The Perilous Gard_, and Dinsdale Draco's white dancing gloves.
> 
> But [blame](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-parable-9/) it on the [basalt](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/magazine/rights-exempt/2017/06/Lava-Tubes/lave-tubes-kazumura-cave.adapt.1900.1.jpg).


End file.
